1

Please quote this article as follows:

Ruth Sonderegger, "The Ideology of the Aesthetic Experience. An Attempt at
Repoliticizing", in: Sonderforschungsbereich 626, ed., Between Thing and Sign, Berlin
2010, http://www.sfb626.de/en/veroeffentlichungen/sonderegger.pdf

For the Index of Contents see:
http://www.sfb626.de/en/veroeffentlichungen/thingandsign/


The Ideology of the Aesthetic Experience
An Attempt at Repoliticizing

Ruth Sonderegger

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.
- Friedrich Rckert / Gustav Mahler

Funderlaying Undermentals
- Keziah Jones

I.
The conference where this text originated put two suppositions up for discussion: that
the artwork is a relation between thing and sign and that a theory of the artwork
characterized in this way must take the aesthetic experience as its methodological
center. Keeping the first supposition in mind in the following, I also assume that if we
assert the categories thing and sign as essential qualities of the aesthetic, then we
are exclusively speaking about the limited aesthetics of art, whereas I will re-interpret
the opposition between thing and sign as a triad. Beforehand, however, I would like to
question the methodological centrality of the aesthetic experience. For if we make
aesthetic experience the leading category,
1
we conceal, as I see it, what is essential in

1
Cf. the first sentence from the editors introduction in Joachim Kpper and Christoph Menkes book
Dimensionen der sthetischen Erfahrung (Frankfurt/Main, 2003), 7: Aesthetic experience is the
foremost term that has marked the discussion about aesthetics since its re-introduction in the late sixties
and early seventies of the twentieth century. As a description I find this thesis absolutely convincing for



2
art. And, as is well known, we do not tell the truth unless we put everything on the
table that could be said. The category of aesthetic experience, in my opinion, first
becomes useful, and even indispensable, precisely when we decentralize it.
In art theories of the aesthetic experience, what seems to me to get neglected, or at
least to get shifted into a secondary position between thing and sign, is the world. But
what is missing in such art theories is more than just an inclusion of the world in
general. What also goes missing is each specific world that the artwork addresses as a
single one to all recipients together, and along with it the political in the artworks. This
is the reason for my suspicion, which I will explain in the following, that it is the
category of the aesthetic experience, or rather, the way that it has been laid out in
German language discussions of aesthetics, that impedes seeing the political in art and
thematizing it correctly.
2

In doing so, I do not mean to equate the notion of the political with art, much less to
displace it. I would only claim that a certain notion of the political becomes visible as
the correlate of aesthetic experience if we grant aesthetic experience its legitimate, but
no longer leading function. As will become clear in the end, the political, as I see it,
does not amount to the defense of any particular division of art the documentary, for
example. It is much more about the political of a general and normative notion of art.
3


II.

the German speaking context. I would, however, like to show that we should not deduce any normative
power from this fact, particularly since facticity anyway has the tendency to act as a kind of norm.
2
This is also why I speak of the ideology of the aesthetic experience. If de Man felt it necessary to warn
us about the ideology of the aesthetic in the early eighties because the aesthetic seemed to him
inseparably bound up with the ideological promise of blazing a sure and even excellent path into the
world, it seems to me now to be time to thematize the ideology of the aesthetic theory of experience,
which, incidentally, has very little to do with de Man (cf. Menkes afterword to the German translation
of de Mans Aesthetic Ideology). For these theories have so resolutely cut off art from the world that
very little remains, even of the art, so that the worldly interests behind such theoretical politics becomes
all the more explicit. Cf. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, in The Resistance to Theory
(Minneapolis, 1987), 3-20; and Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, Andrzej Warminski, ed. (Minnesota,
1996).
3
Holger Kube Ventura has developed an alternative concept of the political in art in his Politische Kunst
Begriffe in den 1990er Jahren im deutschsprachigen Raum (Vienna, 2002), by discussing above all the
aestheticization of politics on the one hand, and politics with the aid of art on the other, to various
degrees of intensity. I would like to distinguish my understanding of the political in art from both of
these dimensions of the political, which, in my opinion, cannot correctly be claimed under the title art.



3
I begin with the questions when, why, and how art got lost in the aesthetic experience
theories of the world. If we take seriously R. Bubners manifesto for an aesthetic
experience entitled, On Certain Conditions of a Current Aesthetics, there were two
reasons in the early seventies to look back to Kants theory of aesthetic experience:
4

first the empirical disappearance of works called traditional and closed in favor of
aesthetic events that depend on their experience. Second, Bubner claims that this
outdatedness, which is not at all empirical, but which is valid for any normative
critique of it, is what philosophers in particular have praised as the higher truth located
in art. Bubners reflections are directed on the one hand against work aesthetics, an evil
that he also refers to as an ontological trap.
5
The second enemy is truth aesthetics,
which determine the essential in art through the particularities of contents or through
particular forms of presentation of content and in doing so attribute a superior form of
artistic truth to art. In this respect, the fundamental opponents to Bubner are
hermeneutics (especially Gadamer and Heidegger) and even more intensely the
critique of ideology (Marx, Lukcs, and if in a more complicated way Adorno and
Benjamin). With the aid of the untimely categories work and truth, as Bubner sees
it, theorists of truth make presumably better philosophy out of art. Art is obliged to
reveal those higher and deeper philosophical truths that philosophy no longer dares to.
What initially looks like a revaluation of art is for Bubner its strongest devalution. By
reducing art to philosophy, art loses its own logic.
Objecting to the obstinacy of art aesthetics and being skeptical at undertakings in
which art functions as some proclaimer of higher (philosophical) truths is a good
intention, precisely on the terrain of philosophy. For here, though art incorporates as
much as it rejects, its own genuine logic has never been given very much attention. In
my opinion, Bubner, by snatching art out of the traps of philosophy and bringing it
back to its own autonomy, not only goes a little too far, he goes fundamentally in the
wrong direction. Hermeneutic and ideological critical theories of art may define art in

In doing so, I am in no way negating the fields analyzed by Kube Ventura, quite the opposite. Their
examination is a necessary complement to the art theories developed here.
4
Rdiger Bubner, ber einige Bedingungen gegenwrtiger sthetik, in neue hefte fr philosophie,
(issue 5/ 1973), 38-73.
5
Ibid., 38.



4
terms of its ability to convey truth, thereby denying the difference between art on the
one side and world-disclosure, philosophy, social critique, or negative theology on the
other, but Bubner takes this fact and draws an entirely unacceptable conclusion:
namely that the category of truth is fundamentally dismissed in relation to art and that
the discussion must be referred back to the question of the contents of art. Instead of
examining in which particular and possibly unique ways contents and the question of
their truth in art come into play, Bubner assumes that art is only really autonomous
when it dismisses content and its demands to truth.
In doing so, Bubner defends an aesthetic experience that in the end is not about saving
art, but much more about the self-affirmation of a curiously quixotic subject due to a
mixing of the senses.
6
Paraphrasing Kant, he defines aesthetic experience as follows:
Judgment is confused and this is what makes the function of the power of judgment
present in the first place.The fact that the reflecting power of judgment attains no
goal makes it aware of its communicating function in the first place, and this in turn is
the basis of the aesthetic effect. This is what Kant meant by the quickening of its
cognitive powers and the incitement of a feeling of life in which, at the level of
sensation, that is, without any concept, the pure achievement of intellectual
communication is itself represented.
7
What Bubner thus claims for the salvation of
arts autonomy that the subjects power of recognition in the aesthetic experience
only plays with itself and not with an object is, I think, in any case the autonomy of a
particular subjective experience in relation to the recognition of the world and of the
self. For the aesthetic experience reconstructed by Bubner and its disinterested pleasure
can, if the subject is subtle enough to abstract from the always possible determinations
of an object, be ignited anywhere for instance even with natural or imagined objects.
For this reason, the disinterested pleasure of the aesthetic self-experience is not suited
to designate autonomous artworks as the quite specific occasions of aesthetic
experiences.
The claim that Bubners reflections presume, that philosophy must orient itself to the
phenomena of art and must make a contribution to the philosophical understanding

6
Ibid., 66.
7
Ibid., 65f.



5
of art,
8
remains unresolved. And his demand that the philosophy of art take up
precisely the very latest art phenomena as its challenge, and therefore must seriously
deal with the new tendencies of the second half of the twentieth century, from
boundary breaking to the increasing role of art as event, seems to me, in light of his
more recent publications, mere pretence. In his essay sthetische Erfahrung und die
neue Rolle der Museen, for example, he castigates nothing as much as the fact that
museums in recent years have become places for the staging of the social and
democratic avant-garde and that exhibition objects have become appendices of the
actual occurrence.
9
He inveighs further: If they (=the agents of the younger
movements, R. S.) want nothing else than to put themselves into action en masse, and
that is understood more or less non-verbally for an appearance of art, works are then no
longer works at all. They appear as provocations and shocks, confusing video
installations, the repetition of television wasteland with endless loops, in short, as the
waste of civilization, tossed at your feet, not even at eye level.
10
Alongside the
disappearance of painting from eye level, the actual impetus is obviously one of the
self-staging of the incriminated social and democratic avant-garde, propelled by
youth, and one has every reason to assume that in the early seventies there was also a
social and democratic aspect of the avant-garde, that Bubner was annoyed with the
ideological critical aesthetics of Benjamin and Adorno, and this caused him to dismiss
all contents of art, along with their utopias, as dangerous to art.

III.
Contrary to Bubner, one can of course consider plausible theories of aesthetic
experience that take account of the importance of objecthood, however limited, indeed
exactly in a way that the art object is not automatically reduced to being a (higher)
bearer of truth. To speak of aesthetic experience as a space between thing and sign is
exactly such an attempt. Following from this, I will now briefly explain why the duo

8
Ibid., 39.
9
Rdiger Bubner, sthetische Erfahrung und die neue Rolle der Museen, in Kpper and Menke, eds.,
Dimensionen sthetischer Erfahrung, 37-48, here 37.
10
Ibid., 40. [trans. DH]




6
thing and sign should be reconstrued as the triad of material, form, and representation
in the mode of imparting information. Then I would like to pursue the intuition that
even this triad still has something wrong about it, in that it explains the complex field
of art as an experience that may indeed be related to the object, but is nonetheless
fundamentally individual.
Aesthetic endlessness, which also plays a significant role in the two most important
theorists of the artwork between thing and sign Valry and Derrida is, I think,
misunderstood if we, like Bubner, see it as the idea that aesthetic experience has no
relation to the world, but that it plays out essentially in the recipients head, at any rate
where the faculty of recognition lies. This denies the relation to a material object, a
thing, as much as it denies the relation to a sign in the sense of a hermeneutic object,
and in the context of artworks, I am thinking of a representation of the world that
appears as the message x (=the represented piece of the world) is an issue, indeed for
everyone. In the following, countering such denials of the object relation as an
artworks status as thing and sign, I would like to show that aesthetic endlessness is the
result of a complex, namely threefold relation of the artwork to the world.
To experience something as an artwork means to experience it as the representation of
a piece of the world, and that in a way that this representation as the hermeneutic
object is constantly thwarted by the objecthood of the elements of representation in a
double way. By objecthood I mean on the one hand the material side of the elements of
representation, which are often referred to as the tangible, on the other hand, the
formal referential context of the elements of representation. I see the latter as a
necessary transition from thing to sign and vice versa. This doubled objecthood,
negatively referred to the representation as hermeneutic object, justifies continuing to
speak of a work, despite turning away from closed, organic, and other obsolete ideas of
the work however fragile and temporary the work as a reference connection of three
objects may be, and however disputed the works borders to being beyond the artwork
may be. It is also the thwarting of the represented world by the material and formal
work-hood or objecthood, which the successful aesthetic experience potentially makes
endless. This means that at some point precisely in the name of its own logical
difference it must necessarily end, albeit never at a particular, terminal point. The



7
endless, which now means randomly endable experience of artworks therefore consists
of constantly experiencing something as representation; but equally as a merely formal
connection, endowed by the arrangement of repetition, variation, and difference,
between elements of meaning or the senses. And finally, the art object must also
continually be experienced as the collection of material occurrences, which not only
disrupt any talk of a hermeneutic context of representation, but also those of a merely
formal one. Having an aesthetic experience therefore in no way means taking leave of
objects, rather it implies its permanent reconstruction in a threefold form.
As such, at least the objective, tangible, and mediated through them also the work
dimension of the artwork is restituted and the opposition of thing and sign is extended
around the aspect of form, which cannot be reduced to either of the two elements in the
opposition. I am not taking form into account in this process precisely because it has so
often been emphasized in relation to art as the essential quality for instance, when it
is claimed that art is not about what, but about how. Form seems to me much more the
necessary connecting element between the tangibility of the artwork in the sense of
materiality and the artwork as sign. As much as I concur with the theorists of the
artwork as thing and sign that the artwork presents itself to the recipient as various,
disparately arising, and mutually referencing objects, it seems to me that this is not a
matter of some switching back and forth between completely different objects. The
transition between the experience of an object as meaningful communication on the
one hand and as randomly pre-existing material on the other is the formal arrangement
of the material, or a certain arrangement of incomprehensible signs, that one has just
tried to read as meaningful. Or, put another way: Between the materiality in its
randomness and the representation in the mode of communication, there exists the
intentionality or the reference to the intentional constructedness that is inherent to any
formed arrangement. This intentionality is not yet an act of communication, but it is
more than a mere coincidence. Artworks are distinguished as those objects in which
the modes of the random, the constructed, and the speaking are ceaselessly transferred
into one another. For the side of the opposition related to the sign, here extended to a



8
triad, this means that the artwork is not only about the intentional in signs, but also
about the constellation of signs, which are (mis)taken as acts of communication.
11


IV.
The reconstruction of this very general logic of the relation between the aesthetic
experience and its object says little,
12
other than critiquing those positions hostile to the
object, like that of Bubner. And so I come to self-criticism, but at the same time,
however, also to the truth dimension of art, which opens the way into the political in
art. The reconstrued logic proper to art is admittedly rather trivial and for this reason it
is quite correct only to tackle it when the relation between the named elements is
denied, or when one of the elements is made into an absolute when explaining the
particularity of art works,
13
or when speaking about art in general is called into
question or labeled as ideological.
14
For even if the partial correctness and the
relevance of my (or a related) explanation of the obstinacy of art is conceded, questions
still arise. (1) Is this characterization not much too general and does it not suggest a
idea of art as timeless, which then contradicts the heterogeneity of the arts as much as
the historical developments within the arts and in the end even the singularity of each
individual artwork? (2) Is my proposal for the explanation of the relation between the
aesthetic object and its experience in the end not once again indifferent to the truth
question, or the problematic of specific and even more political contents and as
such no less aestheticized than Bubners aesthetic? For the triad material-form-
representation initially seems not to demand anything more than the representation of
some kind of contents, and so the truth question would become superfluous at many

11
I have tried to show the fact that, for instance, Derrida, as a theorist of thing and sign, has no
instrument to distinguish between these two dimensions of the sign in Ruth Sonderegger, A Critique of
Pure Meaning: Wittgenstein and Derrida, in European Journal of Philosophy (issue 5/ 1997) 2, 183-
209.
12
I have explained this point further in Ruth Sonderegger, Fr eine sthetik des Spiels. Hermeneutik,
Dekonstruktion und der Eigensinn der Kunst (Frankfurt/Main, 2000).
13
One example of the denial of this relation are Bubners arguments; we can see one of the elements
being made into an absolute in one-sided hermeneutic or formalist theories of art.
14
This, for example, is the case with Hunters critique of the Schillerian and post-Schillerian aesthetic
experience, following Kant. Cf. Ian Hunter, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies, in Lawrence Grossberg,
Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies, (New York/London, 1992), 347-372. The same



9
levels. Under these circumstances, not only would it arrive at the representational
dimension of artworks much less than at the exchange between representation and the
questioning of the representation through one and the same object; the question of truth
and the relevance of specific contents would, more than ever, play no role.
15

First to address the accusation of generality: This incriminated generality is not bad, if
it is understood as a gesture of modesty. Then a general theory of art and its experience
is at the same time the confession that it can only clarify the very general, and in most
contexts this means the trivial because uncontested and above all that it cannot say
everything that must be said about art for conceptual reasons. Furthermore, I believe
that the above characterization of the term art, seemingly almost empty, is not only
open to a necessary concreticization, but that it refers to such from within. But if we do
not make the implications of this reference explicit, the triad form-material-
representation also remains problematic, especially in relation to the question of the
political.
16

The artworks called for by this triad do not presume to negotiate any particular
contents represented in the work, but instead those that are meaningful for each of the
recipients, and this means the specific recipients. Otherwise the formal and material
negation of these contents would present no subversion and would not arouse the
expectant potential endlessness that characterizes artworks and their experience, but
would only bring about the quick end of an only supposedly aesthetic experience. Only
where the meaningful is put into play in the eyes of the viewer is his material and
formal destruction actually so, and the simultaneous indestructibility of the negotiation
of concrete contents is also a confirmation of its meaningfulness. The notion of
meaningfulness does not in any way here only refer to high ideals or utopian goals, but
also to seemingly uncontested certitudes, whose artistic questioning is understood as

could be said for purely descriptive art theories, whether based in classical sociology or discourse
analysis.
15
The same critical questions about specificity must obviously also be posed in reference to
contemporary forms, uses of media, etc., because contents are also constantly being inscribed within
them as well. In this point I am following Adorno, who drew attention to how much form and material in
art are settled contents and how certain contents can gravitate toward becoming form in their repetition.
16
For this reason, I now find the fact that I did not spell out these implications in Fr eine sthetik des
Spiels problematic.




10
subversive, and increasingly so as the things that are brought in become second nature.
The general notion of meaningfulness, which is implied in the triad, does indeed itself
imply focusing on the here-and-now of the recipients together with their pressing
questions and unchallenged basic principles. But what this means for each specific
artwork cannot and may not give a general conception of what art and its
experience is. This has to be left to the time period and its battles and not least to art
itself, in that some meaningfulness is first made visible only through artworks. This,
however, only reminds us how few provisions can be made by a general notion of art
as relation between the material, form, and representation of art, and that the
unendingness of the aesthetic experience that we are postulating refers to contents
specific to the viewer. An answer to the second question directed at my perhaps much
too general notion of art, namely to what degree art characterized by this notion is
actually about truth or even about the political, is still lacking. But an answer already
lies hidden precisely in those constitutively concrete contents, which my general notion
of art also refers to.

V.
For this reason I would like to continue by explaining how the general description of
the aesthetic experience, which stretches over three different object dimensions, relates
to specific artworks and in doing so to defend the first (of four) aspects of the political
in art, namely its dimension of time diagnosis.

1. As I have already indicated, treating contents in terms of aesthetics consists on the
one hand in ascertaining what is meaningful for the particular present, which is
doubtless not exclusively a matter of art. On the other hand, in the realm of art and
this is its specificity what is meaningful is presented as both destructible and fragile,
and furthermore worth being destroyed. It goes without saying that this does not mean
that artworks are obliged to present negative contents or contents in their negation, but
solely that in art, relevant positive and negative contents, which cannot be dissociated,
are handled in such a way that they are permanently destroyed and reaffirmed. These
are not neutral declarations. First, they are not declarations because artworks do not so



11
much say how it is, but what should be talked about. And they are not neutral because
they present their contents as fundamentally ambivalent, thereby provoking a kind of
positioning, if not polarization. In other words: The artwork exposes its contents as
meaningful in their contentiousness, namely in the ambivalence between
meaningfulness and nothingness. And the degree of contention here is even an
indicator of their meaningfulness. This is why the specific contents are unavoidable
and anything but random, while art at the same time, however, can never be reduced to
the mediation of some truth, whether philosophical or other.
17
Art provides no
information about what kind of attitude we should assume toward an as yet pressingly
open question, it only makes it clear that we and I will come back to this we
must find and assume an attitude toward this question in the sense of an issue. And I
think that it is above all this time-diagnostic dimension of art that Adorno and
Benjamin, condemned by Bubner as the principle aestheticians of truth, sought to
explain.
This time-diagnostic dimension can be called political because the demand to
determine what is or should be part of the public agenda lies hidden within it.
18
For
artworks appear in a public, however limited, non-transparent and prestructured by
power relations, charged with being a time-diagnostic message for all recipients:
namely the message that x is an issue for the entire we of the recipients, even for its
time period. As such the artwork asserts its claim to speak in the name of a generality.
Or, as Adorno said referring to the musical artwork: Collective perception is the basis
of musical objectification itself, and when this latter is no longer possible, it is

17
This also shows, I think, how undercomplex, that is, aesthetically and politically nave, it is to pit the
truth of politics against art as a game. As can be seen in a recent article by Gustav Seibt, the nave form-
content opposition the goes along with such undercomplexities is in no way only something of the past.
As a response to the self-posed question of where the enormously increased demand for truth in
modern art discourse comes from, Seibt celebrates an art as game, completely free of truth, which is in
no way lacking with respect to that of Bubner. Cf. Gustav Seibt, Gerechtigkeit frs Sofabild. Zu einer
kritischen Philosophie des Kunstgeredes, in Merkur (Nr. 663, July 2004).
18
Politics here means less the prevailing understandings of the term in modernity as a theory of the
state on the one hand and of related governmental and administrative arts on the other, but refers to the
Greek meaning of the term, which in modernity plays a further role more in theories of the (democratic)
public: namely the public negotiation of who belongs to a polity and what its most urgent tasksissues
are. This is the sense, to give a more recent example, in which Rancire, for instance, uses the term of
the political: Politics is primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage, and of the existence
and status of those present on it (Jacques Rancire, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy
(Minneapolis, 1998), 26f.)



12
necessarily degraded almost to a fiction to the arrogance of the aesthetic subject,
which say we, while in reality it is still I and this I can say nothing at all
without positing the we.
19

My defense of specific as well as time-diagnostic contents and therefore of a political
dimension of the artwork seems to come close to what Martin Seel has stated in an
essay with the title Kunst, Wahrheit, Welterschlieung, indeed, in the context of a
defense of an aesthetics of world-disclosure, in which the tangible elements of the
artwork are at best given a servile function. Summing up, he writes, and I would agree:
For it is not the acceptability, but the timeliness of the viewpoint presented by the
artwork that is crucial for its aesthetic validity.
20
Starting from there, however, I think
Seel then takes off in a wrong direction: The validity of artistic articulation and the
validity of what is artistically articulated remain two-fold.
21
We are compelled to
come to this conclusion if, to remain with the terminology of thing and sign, the
tangible dimension must always remain in the service of the emblematic and the
artwork therefore achieves its end by providing a way of seeing. If, in the framework
of such an aesthetics of world-disclosure, we still wish to distinguish between
viewpoints opened up within and beyond art, we must declare the contents, if they are
only halfway timely, to be aesthetically irrelevant and let the formal construction alone
carry the entire aesthetic burden. In these circumstances it is at any rate no longer clear
why the question of timeliness should play any role at all, for it is not founded on
genuine artistic articulation. Contrary to Seel, and therefore assuming what is
articulated is a problem and not its solution, I would like to claim: The validity of
artistic articulation cannot be separated from the validity of what is artistically
articulated. For representational contents are marked as timely only by artistic
articulation in the sense of the successful mutual reference between representation,
form, and material. And because the aesthetic game assumes timeliness, aesthetic
judgment also contains a response to the relevance of the issues in the respective

19
Cf. Theodor W Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, (New York, 2003), 18f.
20
Martin Seel, Kunst, Wahrheit, Welterschlieung, in Franz Koppe, ed. Perspektiven der
Kunstphilosophie. Texte und Diskussionen, (Frankfurt/Main, 1991), 36-80.
21
Ibid., 69.



13
artwork, or rather, such an evaluative response is implied in the genuinely aesthetic
judgment. It is also an assertion of what must now be discussed.

2. A further dimension of the political is aligned with this judgment, implied in
aesthetic judgment, about the meaningfulness of what is articulated, which is not only
outside the individual but even general: the question of who is speaking to whom in
whose name in the artwork. It lurks in all the representations that are commonly in use,
but it takes on a political dimension when and this is constitutive for art an object
of representation arrogates a time-diagnostic claim through public positioning. For as a
time diagnosis, the artwork can take the liberty of speaking for an indeterminate
number of recipients who are assumed to be effected by the contents at hand, and to
represent a we, ideally everyone. That is, it assumes that its only charge is to take
sides with everyone, despite the fact that it calls into question exactly that fundamental
meaningfulness that necessarily leads to polarization and to the insight of what is
perspectival and particular in the generality that it is postulating.
I think it is precisely this perspectival interestedness, which claims to be general, as
well as the reflection on it, that represents the benchmark of the very diverse art
practices since the sixties. First I will briefly go into these art practices and then
explain why (certain) theories of aesthetic experience cannot account for them.
22
The
art practices in question are as much directed against Kantian universalist
disinterestedness as they are against a Hegelian concept of art by which art presents the
one and only total diagnosis of the state of the world, at least as long as it is still the
highest level of truth. It is also directed against Adornos image of the artist, as nave
as it is elitist, as the advocate of the unconscious wishes of those who cannot articulate
them.
23
The objection of recent art practices to such fixed, universalist poles of art, is
two-fold: on the one hand they speak for a minority as part of that minority and
sometimes only for this minority, that is, they consciously limit the addressee for
instance, through the choice of exhibition and performance locations, through the use

22
The fact that these artistic developments have hardly found their way into German language
philosophical art theory does not put aesthetic theories of experience in a good light. A significant
exception to this is Juliane Rebentischs sthetik der Installation (Frankfurt/Main, 2003).
23
Cf. ibid., 280 ff.



14
of references only available to the target audience, etc. This may be because of a desire
not to be comprehensible to a particular audience in order to create a counter public; or
it may be to protect oneself from marketing mechanisms.
We need not point out the fact that such retreats can lead to ineffectual self-reflexive
and group therapies, especially since polemics in this direction have been part of the
standard critiques of contemporary art at least since the most recent Documenta. What
interests me here is the question of whether a critique of the universalism of the time-
diagnostic claim, a critique of the we as the first dimension of the political, is
possible or necessary, and what this means for the political in art. In other words: Is
there an aesthetically successful case in which an art practice or an art object does not
close itself off, but instead presents itself claiming a limited significance to a never
clearly limited public, which in these circumstances is immediately visible as not
neutral and not homogenous? I think this is not only possible, but also necessary for
the success of the artwork. For even those art practices that apparently seek to remain
quite within their minoritarian concerns need a larger audience than what they had
previously conceived, in as much as they are art practices at all.
24
On the other hand,
artworks that deny their particularity, or more precisely the tension between the
particular and the general, would cancel out what is interested, what belongs to their
issues, and in the end also themselves. In this sense, one cannot separate what has so
far been called the two dimensions of the political in art.
Despite all the valid emphasis on the local, one universalist tendency of art is initially
concealed quite factually in mass media, which can hardly be avoided, as well as in the
art market and its industries. And no small number of those attempts to limit the
addressee of art practices are the result of struggling with the universalist tendencies of
this market, which loves to drag what is a secret tip into the wider public. Institutional
critique and site specificity therefore could only become topics and practices of art
under the circumstances of their industrialization.
25
For this reason, the desire to limit

24
I have examined this more thoroughly in relation to the theater of Ren Pollesch. Cf. Ruth
Sonderegger, Adorno geht in das Theater von Ren Pollesch und fragt nach Kulturkritik heute, in
Zeitschrift fr sthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (issue 48/ 2003) 2, 175-193.
25
Cf. for instance Paul Gilroys reflections on the stage of black British film in the international art
world. Paul Gilroy, Cruciality and the Frogs Perspective: An Agenda of Difficulties for the Black Arts



15
the audience cannot be separated from the universality of the (art) market. To this
should be added, and this is the second dimension of the universalist pole of especially
local and/or minoritarian art practices, the fact that artworks as public acts of
representation cannot seal off the boundaries of those deliberately small audiences, and
this is not only a question of the actual audience. They must be seen normatively, that
is, if they wish to succeed as struggles for the recognition of the questions that they
present as valid, and of those presented as being concerned with these questions, and
therefore must be directed toward an outside; even and indeed precisely when their
concerns are minoritarian.
Glocalization
26
is the neologism used to try to understand the tensions in recent
(especially also popular) art between particularity and universality, between the global
and the local. This term in no way expresses faith in the idea that the right balance
between the local and the universal will automatically be regulated through the
invisible hands of a universal market, enterprising collectors, and exotic artists. The
term glocalization, against the generalized suspicions of the culture industry on the one
hand, reminds us that it is not empirically impossible to make convincing art under the
conditions of the universal culture industry. On the other hand, one can, and I would
like to, see this term as the expression of the thesis that art can only succeed as a
diagnosis of its time if it sets up a critical outside, alongside whatever minoritarian,
voiceless concerns there may be, and therefore admits that it is often used for
unintended purposes in the best case taken seriously from unexpected sides.
In contrast to the first dimension of the political in art, with which I wanted to allude to
the time-diagnostic moment quite generally and to this moments claim to generality,
the second dimension of the political in art emphasizes the engagement, very present in
current art, with the necessary perspective and partiality of time-diagnostic claims,
without abandoning it to relativism. This is as impossible with a concept of the
aesthetic experience which forgets the object as it is with one in which the aesthetic
experience is limited to the individual subject, where in art it is essentially about a we

Movement in Britain, in Jessica Munns and Gita Rajan, eds. A Cultural Studies Reader. History,
Theory, Practice, (London/New York, 1998), 421-430.
26
Cf. the chapter Globalisierung/Lokalisierung, in Gabriele Klein and Malte Friedrich, Is this real?
Die Kultur des HipHop, (Frankfurt/Main, 2003), 85 ff.



16
in all its contention, limitation, or even exclusion. Admittedly, the tension between
particularity and generality is in no way solely a characteristic of art; on the contrary, it
is a tension built into the truth claim of all judgments. But it increases when an (artistic
or non-artistic) object claims the generality of a particular diagnosis of time for a we.
One could now ask whether the two aspects of the political discussed so far and also
the way to them, of course do not simply represent an extension of the notion of the
aesthetic experience, whether they are not in fact a critique of the central position of
this category within art theory. Why should we not also grant, for instance, a collective
dimension to the aesthetic experience along with an object related one, or at least a
dimension with some relation to another subject, especially if we have already
distanced ourselves from the Kantian notion of aesthetic experience as the experience
of a subjective experiencer? In this context we could recall, contrary to a too narrowly
Kantian notion of the aesthetic experience, that art forms that explicitly address a
collective, as theater does, have long been the occasion to reflect on how much the
individual aesthetic experience is simultaneously one of a we and of its limitations. If
we also allow, alongside objecthood and the time-diagnostic timeliness, the close
relation of the subjective art experience to a we, to what degree is the political in art
still a critique of the central position of the category of the aesthetic experience within
art theory? Initially I do not see what kind of advantage there could be to subsume the
object of the experience, its industrial and institutional prerequisites, and more or less
collective reception factors under the term of the aesthetic experience of a subject,
even if it does find its expression there. For under these circumstances we must at the
same time once again emphasize that the objects, their production, and the co-subjects
of reception also contain a certain autonomy in relation to the always personal
experience. Therefore, rather than a terminology addressed by the artwork, I would
prefer one of the equiprimordiality of the experiencing subject as part of a limited we,
of the objects confronting him, and of the overriding art and non-art institutions as well
as the quite non-aesthetic, shared world that encompass both of them.
My second objection to the central positioning of the notion of aesthetic experience is
that it does not comprise everything, indeed it even seeks to suppress those things that
are indispensable for a confrontation with art. The experience of art, if it is not merely



17
random, includes proposing, testing, and defending judgments. And at least the last
two activities are not part of the aesthetic experience itself, as much as normatively
understood aesthetic experiences may always be dependent on them. For art theory,
this means that a theory of aesthetic judgment, and not only one of aesthetic
experience, also belongs to them. If we take the notion of art developed here as a basis,
a decisive role is played by the following: to defend the artwork, together with the
contents revealed in it, as meaningful, one must position oneself much more
unambiguously than the artwork itself must or even may do. In this sense, aesthetic
experiences even force their subjects to go outside the area, not only of aesthetic
experience, but even of art. In other words, part of taking the aesthetic experience
seriously is to abandon it. By this I do not so much mean that this experience generates
a pressure to answer and act, and not at all that art necessarily leads to spectacular
political action. For me it is much more about the fact that in the aesthetic discourse, in
the argument that artworks provoke, positions must be taken to that do not themselves
relate to the artwork, but that undermine it time and again. While the artwork only says
that x is an issue, there is always an argument in art discourse about how one should
behave toward a certain issue. For in aesthetic judgments about the time-diagnostic
timeliness, that is, about the issueness if you will the non-aesthetic notions of the
recipient come into play in relation to what should be part of the political agenda; like,
for instance, when someone makes the judgment Great stage, fantastic actors, but I
dont get why theyre putting on a play from the turn of the last century these days. In
other words, aesthetic engagement in the sense of justifying a judgment in critiques,
private discussions, or public discourses must be distinguished from experiencing in
itself, from experiencing in its structure of endlessness, and furthermore also from
engagements with the political evaluations of those taking part in the discourse. This
going beyond aesthetic experience to judgment on the one hand and going outside the
aesthetic at all on the other hand, which is necessary to account for genuine aesthetic
experience, seems to me not only to muddle the terms of debate, but also to encroach
on the facts of the matter, although I do admit that the transition from experience to



18
judgment is as fluid as that between identification and the defense of the contents of
the that and the what of an issue.
27

3. With this I come to two of the important consequences for the question of the
political that arise from the understanding of art defended here, as a complex
consisting of the experiencing subject as part of a limiting we, the object that confronts
it, and the art and non-art institutions as well as a non-aesthetic, common world that
encompasses both of them. The first consequence is that the normative distinction of a
particular notion of art, such as I have taken up here with a mind to their two political
dimensions, which in the end are one, also provides an instrument to distinguish
between the political within art and the political beyond art. This is significant if we do
not wish to represent one of the two resulting, and in my opinion, implausible positions
according to which art either has nothing at all to do with politics, or it has to be
understood as the actual form of politics. The artistic understanding of the political as
explicated here is directed against both of these ideas because it implies the non-artistic
of the former and therefore can never supersede the latter.
Making this distinction seems to me to be particularly indispensable at a time in which
art institutions have a tendency to put politics and (its) theory at the center of the
(sometimes more than) supporting program. Since artworks essentially diagnose their
time, I do not at all find it mistaken if art institutions give space to the issues of their
art outside the space of art as well. Theoretical events in the museum or in the theater
are legitimate if they maintain the problem of the difference between the aesthetic
experiment about whether something is a contemporary question and the discussion of
this question in terms of content, and if they do not misunderstand theoretical politics
as an exotic game with the boundaries between art and non-art, or as a diversion from
the political dimension of art by means of the presumed neutrality of theory.
The difference between an artistic and a non-artistic politics is also essential because in
current exhibition practice that is, not taking supporting programs into account a

27
The fluidity of this transition is the central concern of Thierry de Duves contribution to this volume.



19
problematic confusion takes place fairly frequently between genuinely politically
motivated intentions of action and above all of documentation and the political in art.
28

I would like to make a few comments on Pierre Huyghes video installation The Third
Memory (1999) in order to look into when an artwork, even one is which
documentation plays an indispensable role, could be considered successful. This work
includes a small entryway and a space for a double video projection. The video
material consists of three layers, which are already referred to in the title: (1) clips
from Sidney Lumets film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the film version of a bank
robbery that took place on August 22, 1972, (2) film sequences that Huyghe shot with
the actual bank robber, John S. Wojtowicz, in a reconstructed bank in France, (3) and
finally, at the end of the film, a few live television clips of the bank robbery, which at
the time had even interrupted a televised speech by then president Nixon. The video
installation also includes reproductions from newspaper reports and magazine articles
about the robbery for example, Life magazine immediately printed a half-
fictionalized story about the bank robbery, which in turn was the starting point for
Lumets film. They are found, together with photographs of Wojtowiczs girlfriend,
who became a celebrity immediately after the event in talk shows and magazines, in an
entryway to the projection room. The rooms deep red color lends a sacred quality and
an iconic character to the pieces of information, not to say evidence.
29

Framed by these media stories, which one must pass through to end up in the film
room with its double projection, it is clear from the very beginning that Huyghes

28
As for the more complex practices of the non-artistic documentary in the spaces of art, we must give
them credit for drawing attention to a real political problem, namely that there is not much space for
those public realms found between the documentary of the daily news on the one hand and that of
academic discourse, often very remote from politics, on the other. Not much space also in the sense that
documentation practices that are complex, long-term and/or that experiment with questions of
representation are quickly pushed outside art if they do not fit into current politics or the reigning
notions of academia.
Purely documentary-political works first become really problematic when they are aestheticized:
whether this isin part contrary to the workthrough the institutional context, or whether it is explicitly
desired, for instance as was the case with a sacral interior design that I found unpleasant in the recent
exhibition Die Regierung. Paradiesische Handlungsrume (curated by Ruth Noack and Roger M.
Buergel) in the Wiener Secession (24 February-24 April, 2005). I have discussed a case of a successful,
that is, anti-aestheticized documentation in art spaces in my Eine legitime Nicht-Kunst. Pierre
Bourdieus Algerien-Fotos im Kunsthaus Graz, Texte zur Kunst, (issue 54/ June 2004), 168-173.
29
I am referring here to the work as presented in the framework of the Amsterdam World Wide Video
Festival, 10-20 June, 2004.



20
double video is using material that had already been thoroughly exploited by the mass
media, albeit in a not entirely transparent manner. In front of this backdrop, the video
presents itself as an exception, as a documentary attempt to reconstruct and understand
what actually happened during the spectacular bank robbery, as well as what was made
of it in the various media.
The content of Lumets film, which forms the basis of the double video and is the most
well-known representation of the bank robbery, is a bank robbery, unsuccessful in the
end but nonetheless spectacular, during which things are constantly happening that
have nothing to do with a typical bank robbery.
30
The bank robbers are absolute non-
professionals, which creates an incredible tension from the very beginning as to
whether it will turn out all right.
31
Later an unexpected solidarity develops on the part
of the bank employees held hostage with the bank robbers, after the latter have made it
credibly clear that they only want money, and they want to get all the hostages out
safely. The solidarity between the hostages and the bank robbers is thanks in part to an
unexpected discussion about money that the bank robbers have with the women at the
bank. All the more so as the main character, Sonny Wortzik, played in the film by Al
Pacino, explains to the women how exploitative their jobs are, and that such jobs
necessarily lead you directly to stealing and bank robbery if you want to incur
somewhat larger expenses. In the context of this discussion it gradually becomes clear
why Sonny Wortzik is robbing the bank. He wants to pay for his wifes (who is
currently a man) sex-change operation, something beyond the means of someone with
an ordinary job. This film is neither about the kick of the hold-up as such, nor about
some dream of a lot of money. Instead, it is about a goal that is as modest as it is
unusual for a bank robbery: a sex-change operation. In the end, what is also so
improbable about the true story behind the film is that two amateur bank robbers not
only kept the FBI and a huge contingent of the New York Police in check for almost
half a day, but that they even ordered them around.

30
Cf. also Klaus-Peter Eichele on "Dog Day Afternoon" in comparison with other films about bank-
robberies in idem, "Verbrechen mit menschlichem Antlitz kleine Typologie des Kino_Bankraubs", in
Klaus Schberger, ed., Vabanque. Bankraub. Theorie. Praxis. Geschichte (Berlin/ Hamburg/Gttingen,
2001), 278-287.



21
What seems to me so significant for the aesthetic quality of the film is the alternation
between an almost utopian fairy tale, caught between the implausibility of the plot
according to the rules of probability on the one hand, and the never entirely absurd
quality of the narration, which is, of course, reinforced by the title shown at the
beginning of the film that the story is based on an actual bank robbery. Even if it is
clear at the end of the film how limited this utopian state of exception was, both
temporally and spatially, after law and order have so unrelentingly been re-established,
this knowledge cannot make the incredible things that have occurred in the two hours
of the film less than what they are. I think this is so not least because the film makes
visible how much impossibility can be made possible quite unmysteriously and in
this sense the utopian quality of the film is not at all like a fairy tale how much
impossibility then could be made possible with self-confidence, moral courage, and a
bit of cheek, if we didnt always take the borders between the possible and the
impossible as absolutely fixed.
Against all of this, Huyghe reconstructs the actual events with the help of the actual
bank robber, who from the very beginning had stressed that Warner Brothers, the
producers of Lumets film, had stolen his identity without paying him for it.
32
In doing
so, Huyghe seems to be on the trail of the media reconstruction behind the unequivocal
hero of the utopia in Lumets film and of the creation of a way of acting that goes
along with it, which turned Al Pacino into an icon. Quite in this sense, one gets the
impression at the beginning of the double video that Huyghe had only asked the actual
bank robber and agent Wojtowicz to tell the viewer what had actually happened. But it
quickly becomes clear that the facts behind the fictional film are not being examined in
every respect. As far as the poorly reconstructed bank building and Wojtowiczs
accomplice Salvatore Naturale (John Cazale in Lumets film), the film is clearly
reproduced. It gets even crazier when Wojtowicz, at the beginning of the video, recalls
that he and his initially two accomplices had been inspired by The Godfather (Francis

31
The hold-up begins, for example, with one of the originally three bank robbers giving up already in the
first few minutes, saying that he doesnt have the nerve to pull off such a hold-up.
32
This is perhaps not surprising, since Lumets film also strongly features a critique of the media
apparatus of television. Cf. Klaus-Peter Eichele, "Verbrechen mit menschlichem Antlitz kleine
Typologie des Kino_Bankraubs", 285.



22
Ford Coppola), which had just come out in the cinemas, and in which Al Pacino plays
a bank robber. Even the hold-up is not simply repeated as it actually was. Instead it is
staged as a play, as if even then Wojtowicz had already had a kind of screenplay in
mind, according to which he gave stage directions to the people around him.
In Huyghes double video, however, we are not presented with any ordinary theatrical
performance of a real event, but instead for long periods an anti-theater. For the actions
that the actors carry out absolutely unprofessionally, lethargically, half-heartedly, and
without any theatrical gestures are almost always first introduced by Wojtowicz and
then played back, so that one has to endure a doubling of the events over long periods.
This breaking up of ordinary realism is intensified by the fact that the reconstruction of
the events is recorded by two cameras from two different perspectives and at times
Lumets Hollywood film is also brought in, so that even visually, any presumably
simple narration of the actual procedure does not take place. What I find interesting in
this respect is the fact that Huyghes absolutely sober theatrical action creates a
comedy out of the situation which is also entirely entertaining which is completely
alien to the Hollywood film. For instance, the unprofessional actors who speak after
Wojtowicz seem very uninvolved, even when Wojtowicz is in a rage: I tell the FBI to
go fuck themselves because Im not gonna betray my partner. Its me and him, and we
dont care about the FBI ... and were gonna do what we have to do, without hurting
anybody, because we are the real Americans, not them. And Wojtowicz is a much
better actor than those that hes directing. So the actual bank robbery disintegrates even
more in the attempt to reconstruct it theatrically.
In this way, the video installation not only makes it clear that the Lumet film is part of
a much larger media presentation and is in no way simply the reproduction of a
spectacular story. What is exalted and dramatic in Al Pacinos acting, for example, can
be seen as something non-natural because Huyghe confronts it with a completely
different way of acting, and Wojtowiczs reconstruction also talks about what was left
out of the Lumet story: homophobic name-calling on the part of the police, for
example, and the fact that Wojtowicz only survived due to the chance fact that the FBI
could not come to agreement with the airport police. By making an anti-theatrical play
out of the reconstruction of the actual events that are the basis of all the media stagings,



23
the installation repudiates the expectation that we can get hold of reality by learning
from the bank robbers what is outside all the staging. At any rate, Huyghes video
installation never claims, I think, that the question of facticity and staging by media is
invalid because we already are and have only simulacra. Instead, he emphasizes how
important the evidence is, while at the same time also highlighting how little we
understand if we only know what happened. Furthermore, The Third Memory is a real
existing proof of the fact that art is not subsumed in the reconstruction of facts.
This does not mean, however, that The Third Memory is just some play with the
relation between reality and (artistic) representation in general
33
or of the media
constitution of subjectivity in the particular,
34
as is often claimed in relation to this
work. What plays out over and over again in the foreground in Lumets film, but also
in Huyghes, with all their wit and against any general subject and media questions, is
an enraged, indignant, and militant speech about the money that an upstanding
American citizen is entitled to: on the one hand the money that Wojtowicz needs to
feed the two children from his first wife, and on the other hand the money that he
wants to provide for his second, male wifes sex change. In addition, for the already
aging Wojtowicz in 1999, it is about the money that Warner Brothers and the film
industry in general owe him because he gave them a very successful story, although he
has been living off welfare since his release from prison.
The Third Memory dissolves Wojtowiczs claims of financial civil rights he says of
himself and his comrades: We are the real Americans and copyrights on reality as
well as the claim that his identity was lost to the media apparatus in the form of
repetitions into jokes and absurdity. This absurdity is therefore not glorified as a higher
truth and therefore not as comedy, because the media reflections that produce the
repetitions, the documentary reconstruction, and the uncompensated (financial and
identity) demands are inextricably interwoven with an almost absurdly theatrical story

33
This is what Jason Farago claims, Reality, Narrative, and Reliability: Pierre Huyghes The Third
Memory, http://www.sapheneia.com/huyghe.html.
34
Cf. Jean-Charles Massra, La Leon de Stains. Pour une esththique de la reconstitution, in Pierre
Huyghe, The Third Memory (Paris, 2000), 15-61. Massra assumes, by the way, that the liability of
representation lies solely with Lumets Hollywood film, which presumably only repeats clichs about
gays, using them for the purposes of a lurid story, while Huyghes artwork gives Wojtowicz his true
identity back.



24
line of a bank robbery, which the viewers always know is absolutely serious.
Reflection, narration, play, and rage about real conditions are one and the same.
Recognition and validation are experienced as absurd theater and the absurd theater as
a documentary essay. A good example of this is the end of the video. When it becomes
real in the end, because live television images are shown of the siege on the bank, the
images are at their most blurry; and at this video end, to a certain degree at the high
point of the real robbery, the real Wojtowicz wants to make Hollywood-style heroes of
his hostages and comrades by promising them if they succeed in their getaway, this
short appearance in television will make them stars for the rest of their lives.
Something similar could be said about the interior design of Huyghes bank. They are
not exactly realistic cardboard models in unforgettably boring beige. It is the
embodiment of the bank branch and at the same time its dissolution into a non-color.
I find this installation convincing as an artwork because it unremittingly leads its
completely realized documentary intentions and Wojtowiczs restitution, which is a
media and financial matter, to a dead end that is sometimes humorously verbal, and
sometimes grimly visual, without ever losing sight of the demand, which has become
an enraged litany, for the money that an upstanding real American is entitled to. On
the contrary, the question of what upstanding Americans are entitled to becomes
increasingly important. Demanded by Wojtowicz, a Polish immigrant, who is cheated
of his identity by the son of Sicilian immigrants, namely Al Pacino, and demanded by
someone who wants to have his homosexuality recognized as normality, as something
that one should not make such a fuss about, this demand also becomes a question of
who the we of the real American mentioned here is.

4. Earlier I claimed that we should not linger in the general debate without good cause,
that is, in the debate where I have largely lingered here, namely, in the question of
what structurally belongs to the field of art; indeed because this general debate, if we
look at it more carefully, is not so general. It is motivated by those specific
developments in art and individual objects that one finds convincing as a theorist and
that one would like to defend for that reason. If my reflections on the political
dimension of art apply, the general debate about constitutive aspects of art are not least



25
also influenced by non-aesthetic convictions of what a political issue is. As I see it as a
theorist, one cannot get around these art critical and art political moments in art theory,
that is, around participating in and intervening in the art critical discourse. One can
only either openly carry it out, or fall silent. In saying this, I understand carrying it
out not as a pronouncement of preferences, but as the attempt to argue responsibly for
an art critical judgment in light of existing theories and artistic practices. So in the
fourth place, and this is the second implication of an art understood as a diagnosis of its
time, for me it is a question of critiquing the insistence of certain art philosophers on
presumably disinterested inherent and fundamental qualities in favor of art critical
thought as a diagnosis of the time. And convincing art theory must be formed while
being conscious of its partiality and in mind of its time.
35


Translated from the German by Daniel Hendrickson

35
These reflections are informed by discussions that took place with Romano Pocai and Albrecht
Wellmer in the framework of the research project Zum Verhltnis von Philosophie und Kunst im
Ausgang von Begriff und Praxis der Kunstkritik. I am very grateful to both of them.